The Michigan Road

I grew up four blocks from Michigan Street in South Bend. I always assumed it
was called that because it led to Michigan.

Later, I would live about a mile from Michigan Road in Indianapolis. At
first, I thought it curious that a road would be named Michigan so far away from
Michigan.

I learned later that these roads are one and the same, connecting not only
Indianapolis and South Bend, but the Ohio River and Lake Michigan. For 30 years
in two cities, I had lived near an important element of Indiana history. So I
determined to drive the entire road, all 270 miles of it, and complete Indiana's
original coast-to-coast trip. Along the way, I learned about the road's, and
some of the state's, history.

When Indiana became a state in 1816, most Hoosiers lived along the Ohio
River. The state’s first and largest city, Madison, was on the river, and the
state’s first capital, Corydon, was near the river. Indiana wasn’t ten years old
in 1825 when the capital moved to Indianapolis at the state’s swampy center.
People needed ways to get to the new capital city, and so the state built its
first roads, which were little more than paths cut through the forest. Sources disagree about how many roads were built, but I do
know for sure that the
Madison State Road connected Madison, and the Mauxferry Road connected the
Corydon area, to Indianapolis.

But then in 1828 came the Michigan Road, connecting Madison not only to
Indianapolis, but to Lake Michigan as well through lands newly acquired by
treaty with the Indians who had lived in northern Indiana. The Michigan
Road was complete by 1837 and people began migrating into the north’s flat
but rich farmland.

The Michigan Road was, for its day, a grand thoroughfare. Trees were
felled across a 100-foot swath; the trees in the middle 30 feet were "grubbed,"
meaning the stumps were dug out. In marshy areas, where horses could lose their
footing and wagons become stuck, the road was
corduroyed; that is,
logs were laid across the mucky road and then covered with sand. In some places,
the road was covered with wood
planks to provide an even surface. When railroads boomed in the mid-1800s, private
interests took over the road, covering it in gravel and charging tolls to
travel on it. The rise of the automobile led the state to create a network
of good roads. By the 1930s, the state had taken over and paved most of the Michigan Road. Many
towns had grown to prominence along the Michigan Road, and because the
Road was how people traveled between these places, the state maintained
much of this road as it built bigger and faster highways along corridors that
had become strategically more important to state and interstate commerce.

This
remarkable sequence of events preserved the Michigan Road. It has been moved in
a few places, such as around a horse track near Shelbyville and when a new
bridge was built south of Logansport, abandoning an old one-lane alignment. It
has been bypassed in a couple places causing some of its route to be lost, such
as over a railroad track near Rolling Prairie. And I-74 disrupted the road southeast of
Indianapolis, moving brief segments of the road so exits could be built and even
burying several miles of the road underneath its lanes. But from Madison, you
can drive straight through to Michigan City along most of the road's original path with
only a few brief detours that quickly return you to the road. Along the way, the
road takes on many different characters, from almost-forgotten farm road to
country US highway to major city thoroughfare to Interstate highway.

Plenty
of excellent goodness remains along the Road. Two one-lane 1800s bridges remain,
as do two short one-lane alignments. One long segment has never been part of the
state highway system and rolls with the terrain. Despite being paved and two
lanes wide, driving it is as close as it gets to recalling travel on it in its
early days. And along the way there are a whole bunch of houses, churches, and
cemeteries placed along it in the 1800s when the road was new.

This trip report takes you along the entire Michigan Road county by county
through all 14 counties on the route. Use the navigation bar below to move
through the report. You can click the next and previous buttons to move through
the trip in order, or jump to a county by clicking its name. On these pages, if you click
any photo I've taken, you'll jump to Flickr where you can see the photo in
several sizes and see on a map exactly where I took it.